Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Twitter makes clear its in charge of the apps - Chicago Sun-Times

From an Andy Ihnatko Twitter reality check

"None of this spells doom for Twitter. But it’s a reminder that we should never, ever forget that some of the services we rely on every day are indeed proprietary products. The makers of those products are free to modify, limit, or remove them at any time, for any reason, without any notice at all. We tend to forget that. We think Twitter and Facebook are public roads. They aren’t. They’re footpaths through private property. The fact that your older brother and even your father used to take this same shortcut home from school every day doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it tomorrow, or continue to use it under the existing terms.
And that’s why I paid $50 to support App.net. In broad strokes, the goals of the App.net team is to take the social graph that’s exclusively curated by private hands like Twitter and Facebook, and turn it into a public right-of-way . . . like email."